Past Event

Connie Crothers, Pianist

Connie Crothers is known for her association with Lennie Tristano, yet she is also recognized for her uncompromising spontaneous improvisation, originality, virtuosity and wide range of expression. She leads a quartet, with alto saxophonist Richard Tabnik, drummer Roger Mancuso and bassists Ken Filiano or Adam Lane. In January 2007, this quartet released a CD, Music is a Place, on New Artists. It was chosen by Stuart Broomer for his list of the top ten recordings of the year, published on the website jazzhouse.com; the recording also received an honorable mention for best CDs of the year in All About Jazz/New York. Crothers has performed extensively as a soloist. She appeared solo in the 2008 Vision Festival, and was presented in a solo capacity by the Interpretations Series at Merkin Hall in 2006, where she also performed a duet with Roscoe Mitchell. Lennie Tristano produced her three solo concerts in Carnegie Recital Hall. John Sutherland chose her solo recording, “Music from Everyday Life,” for his list of the best ten recordings of the year in Coda. Her most recent CD—Conversations—is a duet recording with clarinetist Bill Payne. Crothers has recorded duo with Max Roach—"Swish"—and performed in a duo with Mr. Roach in Tokyo, Bologna, New Orleans and at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, with the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company. Roach and Crothers were honored by Harvard University as Visiting Jazz Artists; during the ceremony they performed with the Harvard University Band and tap dancer Diane Walker. For this concert, Anthony Braxton wrote a composition for them. She co-led an engagement at the Village Vanguard with Warne Marsh, in a quartet featuring drummer Peter Scattaretico and bassist Eddie Gomez, a recent guest of Harlem Speaks. Crothers performed with Marsh, with Roger Mancuso and bassist Joe Solomon in Carnegie Recital Hall. When her first record, Perception, originally on SteepleChase, was reissued in 1983 on Inner City, it was selected as one of the ten best records of the year by Mark Weber in Coda. Crothers has had the honor of being a guest on Marian McPartland’s radio show “Piano Jazz,” where the two ladies swung mightily. She is very proud of being selected in the list of the most important and influential musicians in the last twenty-five years of the 20th century in the centennial issue of Cadence magazine. Crothers teaches jazz improvisation in her studio in Brooklyn, passing on a legacy of intellect and musicality that she inherited as a member of the Tristano school.